 | CHAPTER XV The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER XV
THE MILNER COMMISSION
At last, on December 7th, in spite of all threats and
fulminations, the Milner Mission, or more correctly
Commission, arrived quite quietly in Cairo. There had
been no untoward incidents, and the Cairenes were quite
aware, after what had happened on November 16th in
Abdeen Square, that Lord Allenby had no mind to
tolerate any more riotous demonstrations. The Government
had taken some pains to make it a representative
Commission, for Lord Milner had as his colleagues
Sir John Maxwell, who had made many friends in Egypt
and lost none even when he administered martial law
as General Commanding the Forces during the first year
of the war; Sir Rennell Rodd, lately Ambassador in
Rome, who had served for some time under Lord
Cromer during the first phase of the Occupation; General
Sir Owen Thomas, an expert on agriculture in many
parts of Africa, who sits in the House of Commons as a
somewhat detached member of the Labour Party;
Mr. J. A. Spender, who as editor of the Westminster
Gazette has been the ablest exponent of orthodox Liberalism
in the London Press; and Mr. C. J. B. Hurst, one of
the legal advisers of the Foreign Office, who had done
much solid spade-work at the Peace Conference. The
Secretary of the Commission, Mr. T. Loyd, had been
formerly in the Egyptian service, and had won golden
opinions from Englishmen and Egyptians alike. The
of Communications the newest and latest of Cairo hotels,
the Semiramis, and from their windows they could look
across the Nile to the unchanging Pyramids and the
Sphinx with the subtle smile, whose riddle they, like
so many others before them, had come out to try to
solve. Was it to baffle them too?
Could their task have been kept within the four corners
of the declaration of policy which Lord Allenby had
brought out from England, it might have been relatively
easy. In the light of the terms of reference framed for
them with unabated optimism by the Home Government,
they may well have regarded the problem in front of them
as not altogether unlike that which Mr. Montagu had
gone out to India during the war to study with the
Viceroy, viz., that of setting the feet of an Oriental people
on the path of self-government, and it must have seemed
to them of good omen that the elaborate report which the
Secretary of State for India had brought home with him
was just then bearing fruit in a new Government of India
Act, unanimously passed by both Houses of Parliament,
which bore emphatic testimony to the sincere determination
of the British people to share the benefits of their
own free institutions with all nations brought within
the orbit of the British Empire.
In India, indeed, we were breaking fresh ground,
whereas in Egypt the soil was already to some extent,
though badly, prepared. Egypt already had in its
Legislative Assembly and Provincial Councils representative
bodies which, however restricted their powers, had
always been composed of Egyptians alone. The whole
framework of government and administration was
already Egyptian and was bound to remain Egyptian,
and there could be no question of dividing up the
executive into separate British and native compartments.
From the point of view of introducing democratic
institutions, the problem doubtless looked much less
complex in such a small country as Egypt with a now
of social cleavage that are not being constantly crossed,
and whose interests are more universally bound up with
one sole great industry, viz., agriculture, than any single
province in India. On the other hand, it was rendered
more difficult by the presence of large foreign communities
who control directly or indirectly the greater part of the
economic life of Egypt and by virtue of ancient treaties
can in many respects restrict and hamper the operation
of the laws of the country which they do not choose to
accept so long as the Capitulations remain in force.
Therefore in determining the limits within which, subject
to a larger or lesser measure of British advice and guidance,
responsible government, hitherto unknown in Egypt, can
be safely introduced, the Commission knew that it would
be necessary to reckon, not only with the aspirations
and the capacity of the Egyptians themselves and with
our own special interests in one of the great highways of
our Empire, but also with the effect likely to be produced
upon foreign Powers, whose consent must ultimately
be obtained to some very substantial relaxation of the
onerous treaty rights they can at present exercise.
Moreover, when we undertook to legislate for a definite
transfer of power and responsibility to Indians, we knew
exactly where we were, for there was no room for any
doubt as to where power and responsibility had hitherto
lain. They were clearly and definitely vested in the
British paramount power, which alone exercised executive
authority. It was therefore a straightforward question
of devolution as well as of decentralisation. In Egypt, we
have never professed to rule or even to govern, but merely
to play the part of vigilant advisers, though our advice
was frequently transformed into a command. Assuming
that British control was to be maintained, the task in
front of the Milner Commission was to put our own
house in order, to unravel the tangled texture of confused
powers and responsibilities into which the executive
authority vested in the Egyptian Government alone and
fitfully woven during nearly four decades of British
occupation, and to devise a system of advisory co-operation
free from the reproach of arbitrary interference.
What the Commission cannot have been prepared for,
since British Ministers had shown no signs of realising
it and Lord Allenby himself had conveyed no hint of it
in the rosy-coloured speech he had recently delivered at
the Guildhall, was the situation in Egypt itself, or the
reception that awaited it on arrival. During the eight
months which had elapsed since the first announcement
of Lord Milner's mission, we had fallen back into the old
policy of drift, whilst the Egyptian Party of Independence
had been working indefatigably, and, as the event proved,
very successfully, to persuade the Egyptian people to
have nothing whatever to do with the Commission and
to oppose a solid wall of passive resistance, not only to
the inquiry which it came out to conduct, but also to
the very premises on which that inquiry was instituted,
namely, the maintenance of the British Protectorate.
Whether the resistance would have proved equally
stubborn had one or two responsible Egyptians been
invited to join the Commission when it was constituted,
or had been co-opted on to it when it reached Cairo,
is a question that the Egyptians themselves never seem
to have raised.
In the presence of this organised opposition, the
Commission had necessarily to modify its programme,
but it never flinched from its task, which was more than
ample for the short time allotted to it. As it had always
contemplated, it stayed three months in Egypt. They
were three very strenuous months and cannot have been
very pleasant ones for its members. For on the surface
the tactics of the Party of Independence were extremely
successful. The boycott proclaimed by it against the
Commission before it reached Egypt was rigidly enforced,
not only against the Commission collectively in Cairo,
but against individual members who attempted excursions
was a very thorough organisation for watching every
member's movements, and especially those of any one
of them who tried to visit the villages and get into touch
with the fellaheen and see for himself the conditions in
which they live. Emissaries from Cairo dogged his tracks
and often, but not always, succeeded in frightening the
wretched villagers out of their wits with threats of the
awful things that would happen to them if they ventured
into contact with the "unclean thing." Wherever a
member of the Commission travelled or was expected to
travel, the local Nationalist Committee was warned from
headquarters in Cairo to be on the alert, and even at
small railway stations on the line demonstrations consisting
often of a mere handful of schoolboys headed by
a few vociferous effendis, generally lawyers and schoolteachers,
were in readiness to shout "God crush (or
sometimes crash) Milner!" "Long live Egypt! Long
die England!" and other such amenities. So keen
were they not to allow a single member of the Commission
to escape their attentions that on one or two occasions
travellers who had no connection whatever with it found
themselves unexpectedly treated to these patriotic
displays as the victims of mistaken identity. At Assiut
the local Bar threatened to leave the court if Mr. Hurst,
the legal member of the Commission, who wanted to
attend an ordinary sitting of the provincial tribunal,
presumed to enter the court-house. They got for their
pains in this instance an extremely dignified rebuke
which in any other country than Egypt, and even in
Egypt at any other time than this, would have made them
feel very foolish. At Tanta the Nationalists discovered
too late that the town had been already harbouring Mr.
Spender for a couple of days, and that whilst they were
gathering in their thousands at the railway station to
give him a warm send-off, he had departed quietly by
motor for Cairo. So they turned their attentions to the
Governor, who had committed the heinous offence
days, and was only quelled, after one Indian soldier
had been killed and another badly wounded, by bringing
up two battalions to occupy the town. Fortunately
this was the only occasion on which the campaign against
the Commission led to any grave disturbances. Lord
Allenby and martial law saw to that, and the quiet serenity
of temper with which the Commission pursued its labours,
undisturbed by the clamour of a largely artificial agitation,
must have helped not a little to baffle the worst mischief-makers'
schemes. On several occasions when Lord
Milner and his colleagues had to run the gauntlet of
unfriendly demonstrations, the ready tact and good-humour
with which they met the demonstrators promptly
put them out of countenance. In Cairo itself no attempt
was ever made to molest them, and their visit to Alexandria,
the most important commercial centre in Egypt,
brought them at least into fruitful contact with the great
foreign communities, French, Italian, Greek, as well as
English, that are, and must for a long time continue to
be, the vital factors in its economic life.
The prolonged delay in the dispatch of the Commission
had allowed abundant time for a campaign of gross
misrepresentation, which had taught the Egyptians to
believe that its main purpose was to induce them to
subscribe to the maintenance of the Protectorate, and that
any contact with it would be tantamount to a recognition
of British "usurpation." The very conciliatory communiqué
issued by the Commission three weeks after
its arrival, giving the clearest assurances of its desire
to hear "without prejudice" the opinions of all parties
and classes, fell on wilfully deaf ears, and was merely
construed into a reluctant acknowledgment of the
efficacy of the boycott, which it was declared high treason
for any to disregard.
Of all the extravagant protests which the presence of
the Commission drew forth, only two public pronouncements
deserve special notice. That one facet of Egyptian
there had always been reason to suspect, and for months
past it had been very noticeable that almost all the
turbulent demonstrations, usually ending in violence,
originated in popular gatherings held inside the mosques,
where the most fiery speeches could be made with
impunity. But though El Azhar was known to be a hotbed
of anti-British agitation and the great majority of
its students had been allowed to desert the university
in order to perambulate the country and to preach the
boycott in the rural districts, its authorities had never
yet openly identified themselves with the Party of
Independence. They at last found an excuse in an incident
which the extremists seem to have carefully prepared.
Students from El Azhar had been devoting their attention
for some days to the native shopkeepers in the bazaars
adjoining the university, and trying to force them to
close their shops as a protest against the Commission.
The shopkeepers, peace-loving folk with a keen eye to
business, objected and applied for protection. A small
party of British soldiers was accordingly sent to maintain
order and drove off a truculent band of Azharites, who
at first made a show of resistance and then fled down a
small street to El Azhar, whence, as soon as they thought
themselves safe within its sacred precincts, they threw
stones at their pursuers. Neither the young British officer
nor his men knew anything about El Azhar and they fell
into the trap. They only knew that they were being
stoned from a native building, and a few men rushed
the passage leading to the courtyard of the mosque and
followed their assailants up a side staircase. They
were promptly withdrawn when the officer realised that
it was a religious building. But the authorities of El
Azhar were determined to see in this unlucky incident a
deliberate violation of their sacred premises, and addressed
an indignant protest to Lord Allenby, who hastened,
it may be added, to return an extremely conciliatory
reply, explaining the circumstances and only drawing
under which the soldiers had acted. The real purpose
of the protest became apparent, when the native
Press published at the same time a long and vehement
epistle which had accompanied it from the highest
dignitaries of El Azhar, setting forth the claims of the
nation to "complete independence" and endorsing the
whole ultra-Nationalist programme.
Though addressed to the High Commissioner, it was
a manifesto which would reach in due course every village
and every mosque in Egypt and far beyond the frontiers
of Egypt. It was an open defiance of the authority
exercised by the High Commissioner under the Protectorate,
which he had been sent out to uphold, and on the
face of it an equally open defiance of the authority of the
Sultan who had accepted the Protectorate. For Sultan
Fuad had succeeded to the same supreme control which
the Khedives had always enjoyed and which the ex-Khedive
Abbas in particular had tightened up over
El Azhar. It would have been unthinkable in the days of
Fuad's predecessors that the Grand Mufti and all the other
Grand Ulemas and Ulemas of El Azhar should venture
on so grave a step without having taken the orders of
their titular head who was also the head of the State.
It was stated in British official quarters that the Sultan
sent for some of the signatories and rebuked them in
private, but there were few Egyptians who believed
that he had not been in some way either privy to their
action or powerless to prevent it, when he did nothing
publicly to mark his displeasure.
Of far less importance, but not without its own significance,
was a manifesto with which most of the princes
of the Sultan's own family followed suit. It was in the
shape of a letter addressed to Lord Milner, but published
simultaneously in all the Nationalist papers. Like the
grave and reverend seigniors of El Azhar, these "descendants
of the glorious Mehemet Ali"—who, but
for British bayonets, would have been swept out of Egypt
"the Egyptian" in 1882—proclaimed their loyalty to
the cause of the Egyptian nation, and affirmed their
determination to co-operate in vindicating Egypt's
right to "complete independence." Again, it would
have been unthinkable in the days of any other Egyptian
ruler that the princes would have thus flouted his authority.
For if they only were loyal to Egypt who repudiated the
British Protectorate, was it not tantamount to charging
with treason to the nation's cause the head of their house
who consented to accept and to retain the Sultanate under
the Protectorate? Again the Egyptians, who knew
what would have happened in such a case under any of
their former rulers, drew their own conclusions from the
Sultan's failure to call his kinsmen publicly to order.
Saad Pasha Zaghlul of course telegraphed his gracious
approval and congratulations both to El Azhar and to
the princes.
When the Commission departed early in March, the
Nationalists boasted that it had left Egypt utterly
baffled, humiliated, and defeated by the resolute will of
a united nation more than ever determined to achieve
"complete independence." The boycott, they declared,
had been maintained triumphantly all along the line,
and patriotism had won a bloodless victory. But in no
country are appearances less to be trusted than in Egypt,
and the Commission had by no means failed. It kept
its own counsel as to the conclusions it had drawn from
all that it had heard and seen, but it had certainly heard
and seen a great deal. The boycott itself must have helped
it to draw certain conclusions with which the Party of
Independence may not have reckoned. What other
interpretation can it have placed upon the boycott than
that the leaders themselves were afraid to face a frank
discussion of their demands, or upon the systematic
intimidation practised by them to enforce the boycott
on all their followers than that they dared not expose
their people to direct intercourse with the Commission
suspicion they had so laboriously created? If the
Nationalists are justified in claiming that they speak
for the nine or ten millions of inarticulate peasantry as
well as for the small minority who form the politically-minded
classes, why should they have done their utmost
to prevent members of the Commission, who have been
accustomed in their own country to move amongst the
masses, from seeing with their own eyes and hearing
with their own ears what is the life and what are the
needs and wishes of the Egyptian masses? What other
conclusion can the Commission have drawn than that
there are ugly skeletons in the Egyptian political cupboard
which the Nationalists are interested in concealing?
One of the most urgent questions of the present day is
that of the relations between rackrenting landlords
and tenants, and of the wages of agricultural labourers,
which, with the enormous rise in the price of foodstuffs,
have ceased to be living wages. But the Nationalist
propaganda depends largely for the sinews of war upon
the contributions of the great landowners, who are also
the great profiteers, whether they open their purses
willingly or, perhaps more often, under a pressure that
savours of blackmail. Now these are questions in which
some members of the Commission were particularly
interested. What conclusions can they have drawn
from the elaborate precautions taken by the Nationalists
to head them off the inquiries they wished to make for
themselves? What opinion are they likely to have formed
as to the real purpose of a movement which professes to
be essentially democratic and makes a special appeal to
the democratic element in England, when its leaders are
afraid to allow the humble folk, of whom they pretend to
be the spokesmen, to have word for themselves with a
democratic member of the British Parliament? If the
Nationalists wished to estrange the sympathies and
excite the distrust of men who were most disposed to
believe in their cause, they could not have done so more
and the methods they adopted to enforce it. That may
well prove to have been one of the most important, if
negative, results of the Commission's journey to Egypt.
Not less edifying must have been the insight it gained
into the cross-currents of intrigue that fought beneath
the smooth surface of agreement between the different
groups of Egyptian politicians. The Party of Independence
claims to have swallowed up all other parties,
and for the time being there is certainly no other organised
party in Egypt. But there are not a few different
shades of complexion even amongst its professed adherents,
and it would be easy to name a good many men of considerable
weight and standing who have never yet subscribed
to its full programme, though they hesitate to
put forward a programme of their own. Such men as
Rushdi and Adli and Sarwat, who held office when the
Protectorate was proclaimed, and remained in office all
through the war, cannot take up quite the same attitude
as the Paris Delegation towards the maintenance of the
Protectorate, however much they may dislike its continuance
and would prefer to substitute some other
nexus with the British Empire. Even the leaders of the
Party of Independence are not all at one in believing that
an independent Egypt could dispense with support
and assistance from Great Britain. Zaghlul himself
has not gone as far as that, or denied that Great Britain
has specific interests in Egypt which Egyptians must
take into account. Nor were all at one as to the attitude
to be adopted towards the Commission itself. None
ventured openly to defy the boycott, but some welcomed
and even sought for opportunities of meeting its members
privately, and passed on the substance of their conversations
to their friends or sometimes to the native Press.
Several ex-Ministers were satisfied that those conversations
offered a hopeful basis for an ultimate understanding
even with Zaghlul, and important communications passed
through confidential channels between them and the
was himself believed to be less intractable than were his
public utterances, with their obstinate reiteration of the
one sterile proposition that the recognition of "complete
independence" must be a condition precedent to any
sort of negotiation either with the British Government
or with the Commission. Some of the deliberate mischief-makers
at one moment betrayed their alarm by throwing
out reminders in the Press that Zaghlul after all was
originally a creation of Lord Cromer, and with such a
congenital taint might well be in danger of backsliding
unless a close watch was kept upon him by the "seagreen
incorruptibles" of stalwart Nationalism.
Whilst the Commission desired nothing but frank
and open speech with the Egyptians, the politicians all
clung to the methods of secret diplomacy, except when
they thought to serve their own purposes by calculated
indiscretions. These were so frequent that it was easy
to follow the mysterious goings and comings between
different groups in Cairo, and between Cairo and Paris,
and equally easy to detect the unfortunate part played
by personal jealousies and ambitions and the deep-rooted
distrust of each other that prevails amongst
Egyptian politicians, in defeating the well-meant efforts
of those amongst them who were most anxious to open
up some avenue of fruitful discussion with the Commission.
The peacemakers might have been more successful if they
had had in a greater measure the courage of their convictions,
but their failure was certainly not due to any
unwillingness on the part of the Commission to welcome
their co-operation and to agree to almost any suggestion
made by them with a view to facilitate practical negotiations.
The Commission evidently realised very soon that
Zaghlul and his friends, however slender might be their
hold on the Egyptian masses, were at least in full control
of the political machine, and that until they were induced
to take a hand in negotiations there could be little or no
prospect of any issue by negotiation from a deadlock
on the other hand, were quite aware that, unless they
could keep the wires cut between the Commission and the
Nationalist headquarters in Paris, the moment would
inevitably come when the dissensions, disguised for the
time being under vague but comprehensive political
formulæ, would break out in the open. It is easy enough to
show a solid front on a platform of mere negation such
as the refusal of the Nationalists to negotiate with, or
even to talk to, the Commission. Had they talked or
negotiated, they would have had to pass from mere
negation to constructive propositions, and these it is that
the out-and-out opponents of any understanding with
Great Britain dread, because they are bound at once
to produce differences of opinion and provoke dissenting
criticism even from political friends and supporters,
who in Egypt especially are always potential rivals.
Had the leaders of the Party of Independence laid
themselves out to demonstrate how lacking they are in
any statesmanlike sense of proportion and even in tactical
skill, or how little they trust each other or the mass of
their followers, they could not have done so more
effectively than by their attitude towards the Milner
Commission. There are better sides to Egyptian
Nationalism than those which its political chiefs chose
to exhibit, and the Commission will not have neglected
to take note of them. But a nation's capacity for self-government
has to be judged very largely by the capacity
of the men by whom it elects to be represented, and that
these did not serve Egypt wisely when they had a great
opportunity is a conclusion for which they have only
themselves to thank.
But if the Egyptians were too short-sighted or distrusted
themselves too much to afford the Commission
the opportunities of consultation which it had been
instructed to seek, there was another part of its inquiry
which the boycott could not affect. For the first time
since the Occupation the methods and agencies of British
Government and Administration were subjected to close
investigation at the hands of a responsible and independent
body officially appointed for the purpose. Such
an investigation was sorely needed, for the war had
merely precipitated and clearly demonstrated the breakdown
of a machine which had gradually outworn itself.
The time at the disposal of the Commission was perhaps
unduly short, but it sufficed to collect abundant materials
for informing the judgment of British Ministers. It
probed the records of the public departments. It listened
to the views, not only of the British officials, but also of the
British unofficial community, whose existence the officials
had fallen into the habit of ignoring. It heard, directly
or indirectly, the opinions of many Egyptians, both
official and unofficial. As for documentary evidence, it
probably accumulated, as most Commissions of a similar
order do, far more than it could possibly digest. Above
all, it was able to witness at close quarters how the country
was governed and administered during its stay in Egypt,
and the one lesson it must assuredly have learnt is that
such conditions of governmental and administrative
confusion could not possibly endure, because they were
fast becoming unendurable for Englishmen and Egyptians
alike.
| CHAPTER XV The Egyptian problem | |